ZURICH 🏦 🍫🧀

♪ ♫ Forget about you- One Republic ♪ ♫

Singapore has often been described as the Switzerland of Asia...so it was quite nice to take this short trip over to Zurich to have a 'feel of home'. It's similar in that there are many banks, i.e. many office buildings like in Singapore, and the city itself is quite easy to navigate around. It's very clean, the people were very friendly/helpful but of course the difference is that there were MANY chocolate specialty shops :P

My first stop was Läderach, and to be honest I was looking for the Lindt shop I spotted on google maps but this store caught my eye as I was walking down the lanes. They have huge slabs of chocolate with nuts, fruit etc. I decided to try a piece of the marshmallow filled chocolate with caramel which was really soft and fluffy inside :D

I then headed over to the Lindt shop on the opposite side of the road, which is actually linked to a another famous bakery/chocolate shop called Bachmann. The best part of the store is that they have a chocolate staircase!!! :D I decided to buy home some macarons cause they had some pretty special flavoured ones like glühwein and chocolate mango!

The last chocolate store I visited was Sprüngli and they too like Läderach make handcrafted chocolate. I got some really nice pralines + truffles (the seasonal special had Amaretto! like my homemade glühwein :P ) from them and probably would savour them SLOWLY as I reminisce about my trip ><

I then walked to this Market Hall called ImViadukt which is a wonderful place to get all sorts of food products like pasta, cheese, pies etc. At the cheese shop, I told the man I quite like mountain cheese in Germany, with a slightly nutty flavour, so he recommended I try this Goldinger cheese which was really yummy! I also bought home some special swiss beer made by the Bier Factory;- they had a special "pumpkin spice" ale, and you can actually taste the spice flavour! Reminds me of autumn :P The ale also has this rather nice reddish tinge to it. On route to the market hall, I actually picked up a flat white from a coffee store I discovered while google-ing cafes called Mame. The barista has won many awards and so if you like some good coffee, especially filter/drip coffee, that would be a place to visit.

I then headed over to the watch museum, since watches are popular in Switzerland. It is connected to the Beyer watch store and I would definitely recommend it as it has an extensive collection of watches and clocks from across various time periods in history, and kind of explains how time was measured differently as well.

I had lunch at Heidi & Tell which is a really nice burger joint- the vegetarian burgers are good too! (which is what I had) And along the way I stopped at many nice stationery shops etc. This burger place is also really close to the FIFA museum so that worked well for me as that was my last stop before heading home. The museum surprisingly had alot to see and do;- many interesting memorabilia and even games. I really liked the collection of stadium seats! So you should give yourself enough time to browse through everything.

It was a really beautiful time in Zurich, with the light winter snow and it's definitely a nice place for a quick getaway, especially if you are in Munich cause we're right at the border and it's only a 3+hour train ride away. The view of the mountains as the train cuts through Austria and Switzerland is truly magical....and it's amazing how you can still see this in the backdrop of those large international banks while in Zurich. This is a view I will never forget, especially when I'm back home eating satay and looking up at these international banks near Raffles Places/CBD area :P